


The Well

by Anonymous_Kumquat



Category: Original Work
Genre: Broken Dreams, Despair, Dreams, Gen, Hope, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Sadness, Short, Wishing Well, glass, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:12:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous_Kumquat/pseuds/Anonymous_Kumquat
Summary: The well is dark and deep. An inky blackness lurks at the bottom, swallowing all light.





	The Well

The wishing well before you is dark and aged. There are stains in the rock from where there used to be water. It is dry now and weathered with the character of time.

It’s a fine summery day, but there is a mysterious darkness emanating from the well that swallows all light. You can’t see the bottom; you can only see the black void that the well fades into. 

And then—oops! Something you were holding drops down, down into the black emptiness. It was something important, something special. 

You feel light and weightless, as though you are floating. Then it becomes apparent that you are, in fact, falling. The special possession that you dropped is drawing you down with it. It is drawing you into the blackness, the darkness, and then you are submerged. 

It’s so black. The blackness is all you can see. 

Ouch! You land on something sharp and hard. Actually, you land on many sharp, hard things. You are bleeding; the sharp objects tear gashes into your skin. It hurts. It stings.

Lifting yourself up hurts even more. There are shrapnels of glass embedded into your body. It hurts as you take them out, and the jagged pieces are stained with your dripping blood.

When you look around, you notice that you are not where you expected to be. It doesn’t look like the bottom of a well should. Rather, it is cavernous area. The floor is covered with shattered glass. There is so much glass that it has formed a bed over the ground, which is no longer discernible from the glass. It feels as though the wishing well that you have fallen into is not, in fact, a well, but rather a long chute that has dropped you into this ghastly place. 

The air is filled with silence; it is melancholic and undisturbed like that of a cemetery. 

Out of peripheral vision, you spot the whites of someones eyes gleaming in the darkness. You strain your eyes so as to discern the person a little better. She appears to be a woman, and she is lying quite still on a bed of glass, appearing to pay no mind to the glass that is prodding her flesh, nor to the scratches that litter her body. Her eyes stare vacantly to the ceiling, perhaps she is looking at the entrance of the chute. 

She doesn’t appear to notice you, or if she does, she can’t seem to bring herself to care. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much she seems to care about. Maybe that’s why she looks so lifeless…

There is a sheen to her you didn’t notice before. Is she turning to glass? 

You don’t look at her any longer; looking at her makes you feel almost as listless as she appears to be. Besides, you have to find what you had lost; it’s absence is making you feel hollow. 

You begin searching for it among the shards of glass. 

By sifting through the broken shards, it becomes apparent that the all the fractured pieces are unique, one-of-a-kind. Some appear to belong to each other, but each pattern is distinct and unique. It fills you with inexplicable sadness to see the broken forms of them all, and then it feels disturbing. It feels grossly violating to sift through all of the fragments—as if you are sorting through corpses, but you can’t stop; you need to find what you had dropped. 

Then, in a stroke of good chance, you sight what you are looking for poking through one of the glass mounds. You pull it out, and the glass debris falls from it, and you feel relief and something akin to joy at finding it. 

But then you feel doubt and uncertainty…the familiar doubt and uncertainty that drew you to the wishing well in the first place. 

Dropping it may have been all for the better. Such a beautiful thing…it was never meant to be yours anyways. It’s out of reach for someone like you…you’d be better off sticking to something more suited for you…something less grandiose…less lofty.

And then, at once, you notice that the beautiful glow it had before dulls to a weary tarnish. Your prized possession loses it’s beauty, and just like that it looks like everything else in here. It has taken the same quality you noticed in the shattered glass. You instinctively sense its newfound fragility. It feels as though it could shatter in your hands.

And you wonder to yourself…maybe it couldn’t be helped. Maybe everyone was right when they told you needed to think more practically.

What is even the point of returning to the surface? What is the point of returning to all the criticism, the doubt, to a place that will ultimately just leave you defeated?

Maybe…maybe it is better to just to lay here…

You could get used to it; you could get used to the darkness.

At the bottom of the wishing well…

And it feels like you really are in a graveyard. It feels like it is becoming a home; it feels like you are becoming a part of it. You feel like the woman, and you feel as though you understand how she felt.

This must be what Hell feels like: not a fiery wasteland, not a place where demons haunt you, not a place where there is a big scary red man with funny horns and a tail, not even a place for those who have fallen out of favor with some god. 

Yes, this must be Hell: a place with no hope, nothing to try for, no reason to try. 

You feel doomed: as though there is no point in salvaging your possession, as though there is no point in trying to leave this place.

You lie back on the pile of glass rubble.

…

The sunlight trickles in. It’s a beautiful golden color. It’s a kind of beauty you have never taken the time to appreciate before. 

And then you feel it again.

Hope.

It’s a beautiful thing, and you feel a fire spark in you. It feels warm; it feels enlivening, and you feel just enlivened enough to try. You clutch your prized possession close to you. It is glowing with a quality that it has never had before. It feels different, but it’s nice. It feels rosy, beautiful, worthy of someone like you. 

You look up and you can almost see the sky through the darkness.

You imagine what it must look like; the beautiful blue sky. 

And you trust now that there is reason for hope, reason to continue, reason to try. 

It’s safe here; it’s safe at the bottom of the wishing well. You could live here…in mediocrity for the rest of your life.

But deep inside, you know that is not what you want. 

You don’t want to live in mediocre contentedness for the rest of your days. It’s safe, but maybe there is more to life…more to life than being safe. 

It takes unprecedented effort to coerce yourself into getting up. It’s hard, so very hard. But you manage to do it.

Lifting yourself up, you begin to climb. Your fingers clutch the grooves between the stones as you slowly haul yourself up and out of the well. Climbing is hard, but it isn’t as hard as you thought it would be. Getting up was the hardest; it was worth it though. It was worth the effort, because now, you almost feel capable. You feel almost capable of getting out of this place. 

You are scared, but you aren’t discouraged. If you fall, you can always try again. There is nothing for you in that place: nothing to be lost, but nothing to be gained. 

You can almost feel the sun shine on you, even if there is only blackness right now. You climb another inch.

**Author's Note:**

> Not my best work, but I don't think it is bad. 
> 
> I hope you liked it.


End file.
